Spleen-on-a-Chip, an artificial organ:

Hello There! Today I would like to share with you people something new about the advancements in the medical field.

In the human body, just beside the liver, there is a thin blackish organ called “Spleen”. The primary function of this organ is to filter the blood and keep away the filthy matter.

When a person is sick or gets injured badly in an accident, in such circumstances spleen is not able to filter the blood in order to keep away those cells and viruses that are harmful for health, as a result of which blood becomes poisonous, thus threatens the patient’s life.

In order to cope with such a critical situation, the scientists of Harvard University have created an artificial spleen which is being named as “Spleen-on-a-Chip“.

How does it Work:

The patients’s blood is made to pass through this device. This process is started by adding extremely small magnetic grains called “Magnetic Nanobeads” in blood. These grains are coated with a protein contained in the human blood called Opsonin Protein which is changed genetically.

These protein coated grains adhere with germs, viruses, fungi and other poisonous matter. Now when the portion of blood that contains these nanobeads passes through small channels of this artificial organ, the magnets present inside this device pull out these grains. In this way, these little grains carry away the pathogens and other harmful matter along with them, and the purified blood after this process contains only that matter which is necessary for good health, for example blood cells and proteins etc. At the end of this process the purified blood is moved back to the patient’s body.